Exogenous Connectors for Software Components

In existing component models, control originates in components, and connectors are channels for passing on the control to other components. This provides a mechanism for message passing, which allows components to invoke one another’s operations by method calls (or remote procedure calls) either directly or indirectly via a channel such as a bus. Thus components in these models mix computation with control, since in performing their computation they also initiate method calls and manage their returns, via connectors. Consequently, in terms of control, components are not loosely coupled. In this paper, we propose

exogenous

connectors, and demonstrate their use in a small example. In contrast to connectors in existing component models, exogenous connectors initiate calls and manage their returns, and are used to encapsulate control in a component model we are working on. In the example, we demonstrate the feasibility of exogenous connectors, and compare them with connectors in closely related architecture description languages.